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A Lurker's History of Paradox and the Paradox Community * by Stacy Rowley The Borland-to-Corel Windows Days: the Software, Version 7 The Paradox 5.0 code base reached a fork in the road, to be split to two developer teams, one for a 16-bit version to be called PW 6 and the other a 32-bit version (Windows 95 came out in December 1995) to be called PW 7. The latter team finished first and Borland in December 1995 released the 32-bit version Paradox 7 and a 32-bit Borland Database Engine (BDE). Quite a number of improvements were made. More experts were added, as were dockable and new toolbars. Menu layouts were modified. The BDE now allowed two new types of secondary indexes, descending and unique. Enhanced SQL support included more SQL statements being supported, SQL data now could be manipulated directly with Paradox commands, saved SQL files could be used as the basis for a form or report, and the new ObjectPAL editor supports editing SQL code. Tabbed notebook objects made an appearance. Property dialog boxes exist for each object type, providing design-time access to properties. A more direct way of executing initialization code in forms, previously done by postAction in the open methods, was provided in the new Init method. The Object Explorer non-modal dialog box, with its Object Tree panel, provided a very new way for form and report designers to access code and properties. The ObjectPAL Editor received a new interface, which included color coding of syntactical elements, smart indenting, and undos. In May 1996, Borland brought out a 16-bit Paradox (the version number revised to 7) with the goal of offering compatibility with the 32-bit Paradox 7 to help users migrate to Windows 95 and Windows NT. Code for the 16-bit Paradox 7 could be interpreted by the 32-bit version. But the 16-bit Paradox 7 did not offer all the 32-bit improvements. The Borland-to-Corel Windows Days: Borland sells to Corel In March, 1996, Corel acquired Novell's business applications. Borland had several products moving along at this point in time in addition to Paradox, like Delphi, JBuilder, and C++. With 1) a desire to focus on programmer products and 2) the fit of Paradox into the now Corel office suite, Borland chose to step back from Paradox. Corel licensed the Paradox source code from Borland and assumed responsibility for development, marketing, sales and support for Paradox worldwide. Under the licensing terms, Borland was to continue to develop the Borland Database Engine (BDE), which is found in other Borland products as well as Paradox. The few simple words above state the agreement; the effort Corel took on was neither simple nor quick. Corel faced the need to understand 5 million or more lines of code. How many development efforts have you performed which resulted in "just" 100,000 lines of code? What was it like? Have you ever taken over an application of that size, which you knew nothing about, and slogged through ALL the code to understand it well enough to support it? ... and to extend it? Furthermore, developers of programming software like Paradox usually do not have experience developing applications in that software (Paradox), so everything is new. To add to Corel's difficulty, they probably had fewer programmer resources to assign to Paradox than did Borland. Next: The Borland-to-Corel Windows Days: the software, versions 8, 9, and 10 Discussion of this article |
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